Assemble's Folly for a Flyover created a temporary arts venue beneath a freeway in London.
Lewis Jones

by
Stephen Todd

When the curtain went up on the Cineroleum in London's Clerkenwell it unveiled a new way of being in the city. The work of architecture collective Assemble, the temporary cinema in a disused petrol station ("cinema" + "petroleum" = "cineroleum") was composed of a cascading Tyvek curtain strung up around the canopy and timber bleacher seating that had been built by a team of 100 volunteers.

As screenings began, the curtain descended, isolating the space from its busy urban setting. At the end of the performance the drapes rose, thrusting the public back into the bustle of urban life. In several simple gestures and a mass of humble materials, Assemble had captured the public's imagination from its very first project.

That was in 2010. Assemble has since created a pitch-roofed brick and timber event space in the nook under a freeway in Hackney Wick, a "Folly for a Flyover" which was disassembled by volunteers after its six-week tenure and its building materials reused for other construction projects. It's also covered a London tube stop in flamboyant handmade tiles.

Dramatically pragmatic, Assemble's approach has more to do with a building's use than its formal grandeur: kamikaze tactics that create handcrafted assets from undervalued patches of the urban fabric. Not one member of the 18-strong collective is a qualified architect; many withdrew from their studies before graduating or completing professional placement. Others have backgrounds in anthropology, philosophy, history or economics. Assemble's outsider status means it looks for unique opportunities in each endeavour, ways of seeing beyond the official urban planning paradigm.

Passion and engagement

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"We are very much a collective, which means that we often struggle to pinpoint what it is exactly that we do because everyone has a slightly different idea about it," says Adelaide-born Audrey Thomas-Hayes, who joined Assemble a year ago after completing a bachelor of design (fashion) at RMIT then a master's degree in culture, criticism and curation at Central Saint Martins in London. "But one of the great things about the way we work is that we try to make sure that everyone has agency to engage in the work that they want, the projects they feel passionate about."

Thomas-Hayes, along with fellow member Jane Hall, was in Melbourne in late July to represent Assemble at the Living Cities Forum, a think tank operating under the auspices of the Naomi Milgrom Foundation in partnership with the Victorian government. Milgrom, who is Australia's 14th-wealthiest woman and head of the Sussan fashion empire, believes that art, architecture and design – what she calls "creative collectivity" – are intimately connected, and drivers of a better city experience.

That's the thinking behind her foundation's annual MPavilion, installed over the summer months in the Queen Victoria Gardens. Now in its fifth year, the program has seen a hand-picked line-up of international architects including Mumbai's Bijoy Jain, London's Amanda Levete and Rotterdam's Rem Koolhaas create temporary cultural spaces which are then dismantled and gifted to the City of Melbourne for use where and as it sees fit.

The inaugural MPavilion by Melbourne's Sean Godsell now resides at the Hellenic Museum, Jain's 2016 structure is at Melbourne Zoo, Levete's holds pride of place in the Docklands. Last year's Koolhaas pavilion, which was recently installed at Monash University, has been shortlisted for a 2018 World Architecture Festival award for Best Small Project, to be announced in late November in Amsterdam.

View of the Pinós-designed Catalan government offices.
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Democratic hot spots

The structures are more than architectural follies, they're case studies in place-making, democratic hot spots designed to house public lectures, performances and an evolving roster of community activities, from yoga to circus workshops to dog photography booths.

This year's MPavilion, designed by Catalan architect Carme Pinós, will open on October 8. "We need to think beyond the building," says Pinós, who was also in town for the Living Cities Forum. "Architecture is a social service, it starts with social responsibility."

For almost four decades Pinós, 64, has delivered housing, office towers, schools, town squares, bridges and even a crematorium – all of a quiet sophistication. She is admired for the humanism of her buildings, for designing places where people's movements intersect and spaces that engender a feeling of community – even if paid for by private money.

The Cineroleum, in London's Clerkenwell, is a temporary cinema in a disused petrol station.
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"Carme comes from a particular time in Spain when there was a huge amount of investment in architecture and opportunities for architects to contribute civic buildings across the country," says Sydney architect David Neustein​ who, along with architecture publisher and consultant Andrew Mackenzie, is an adviser to the Living Cities Forum. "New auditoria, new town halls, new town squares – it was a period of unprecedented celebration of architecture that gave opportunity to a lot of young architects to build their careers. There was an incredible faith that architecture would contribute to the life and vitality of those places and would help give form to their aspirations."

Vibrant community precincts

Pinós' current projects include the reanimation of a dilapidated Barcelona old-city precinct bounded by the La Boqueria​ market, an historic art school and two new apartment buildings, an exercise in nuanced place-making. For the northern French town of Saint-Dizier she devised an entire masterplan focused on turning its canals, riverbank and historical centre – which includes a 12th-century chateau – into vibrant community precincts.

"The contemporary and the historical should not be in competition, this is something I strive for in all my work," says Pinós, suggesting that new structures need to inscribe themselves in the established urban narrative built up slowly over time, not detach themselves from it. In other words, not behave like "parachuted in" empty icons that speak more to the architect's ego and the developer's budget than to any real sense of place.

Hiroshi Senju Museum, by Ryue Nishizawa, who is speaking at the Living Cities Forum.
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Pinós' MPavilion can be read as a concise distillation of her design philosophy, which advocates community, inclusiveness and universal connection. An open-sided geometric composition of tilted timber planes, it appears wing-like, seeming to flutter lightly upon its garden setting. Readily accessible seating has been embedded in mounds shaped from the landscape itself, allowing people to gather within an architecture that is also part of the earth.

Despite the structure's appealing plasticity, Pinós insists "architecture is not about sculpture. It is more like film, the architect is more like a film director. We must have a script before we can begin. The script talks about humans and sensations, about memories and experiences."

Connecting architecture to humanity

Milgrom says she's excited by Carme's "determination to connect architecture to humanity. She's dedicated to empowering community and encouraging inclusivity through architecture, so her elegant designs exist beyond their own bold presence."

Catalan government offices, which were designed by Catalan architect Carme Pinós, in Tortosa, Spain.
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As architects, town planners and governments search for reasonable means to increase the density of Australian cities without detriment to quality of life, Milgrom hopes the international line-up of her forum will inject fresh perspective. "It's very important that we get external voices to add to the local conversation, to share their knowledge and experiences," she says. "The forum is an opportunity to engage with industry and with government on a state, city and local level."

Martin Foley, Victoria's Minister for Housing and Creative Industries, says creative design can preserve what people love about where they live, even as cities rapidly grow. Both Creative Victoria, which invests in the state's creative industries, and Development Victoria, which develops and revitalises public buildings and land, have partnered with Milgrom to present the forum, demonstrating how her philanthropy is moving from ideas into action.

"We also have a long-term association with the universities," Milgrom adds, "so each of the Living Cities Forum speakers goes to one to conduct a seminar after the event."

Radical and novel

Other speakers at the Forum – of which the AFR Magazine is also a partner – include members of British architectural practice Apparata,​ which is working on an affordable housing scheme in co-operation with transvestite artist (and Trustee of the British Museum and chancellor of the University of the Arts London) Grayson Perry; Japanese architect Ryue Nishizawa, whose radical Garden and House creates a vertical landscape in space-strapped Tokyo; and Australian architect and filmmaker Liam Young who presented Where the City Can't See, the world's first narrative fiction film shot entirely with laser scanners – the same technologies that allow autonomous vehicles to navigate without humans. We hope.

The new humanism as expressed by Pinós, Assemble and the other Living Cities Forum speakers reflects a broader trend in architectural practice towards generosity, integrity and community in the face of exponential population growth. That same ethos is evident in this year's Venice Biennale of Architecture, which has taken "Freespace" as its theme as a means of exploring what curators Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara refer to as "a generosity of sprit and a sense of humanity at the core of architecture's agenda".

"We believe that everyone has the right to benefit from architecture," they write in their manifesto to this year's Biennale. "The role of architecture is to give shelter to our bodies and to lift our spirits. A beautiful wall forming a street edge gives pleasure to the passer-by, even if they never go inside. So, too, does a glimpse into a courtyard through an archway; or a place to lean against in the shade or a recess which offers protection from the wind and rain."

Assemble is present at the Venice Biennale via the Granby Workshop, a social enterprise it founded with the disenfranchised community of Toxteth, Liverpool. The enterprise includes a ceramics studio specialising in innovative techniques such as barbecue-smoking tiles as well as terrazzo created from scrap paper embedded into glazing. Its Factory Floor installation in the Giardini​ Central Pavilion features thousands of clay encaustic tiles it calls a "floor-de-force".

A render of what Carme Pinós' 2018 MPavilion will look like.
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Left to rot

In 1981, along with Brixton in south London, the suburb of Toxteth was engulfed in riots. Cabinet papers reveal that Margaret Thatcher's government considered letting the area slump into "managed decline" rather than fix it up. It's been largely left to rot ever since.

Until, that is, 2012, when Assemble was brought in by the community to not just renovate but regenerate a row of terraces. Assemble re-articulated the existing structures on Granby Street to create new liveable forms. Where a first-floor ceiling had fallen in, Assemble created an atrium and mezzanine. When the outer walls of two houses were all that could be salvaged, it turned the space between them into a majestic winter garden. Structural beams now do double-time as part of the furniture.

The Granby Street project saw Assemble awarded the 2015 Turner Prize, the jury lauding the endeavour as "a ground-up approach to regeneration, city planning and development in opposition to corporate gentrification". It marked the first time Britain's most important art prize had been awarded to a group of people who – in the strict sense of the word – were not artists. "We consider all sorts of potential projects," says Maria Lisogorskaya, one of Assemble's founding members. "If some amazing person came and asked us to build a spaceship in their garden, we'd probably consider it."

Pinós is also present at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, with models of her critically acclaimed Cube office tower buildings in Guadalajara, Mexico. While the towers are a commercial venture, like all Pinós' buildings they're exemplary in the way in which they intersect the ground plan, folding and layering to create community space even within the private realm, effectively facilitating the quotidian dance.

For Pinós, thinking "beyond the building" is not about architecture dissolving into the urban fabric. And public space is not just about parks and gardens. "It is very important that we build houses, but the city also needs singular points with which to identify," she says. "To make a city we need reference points, moments that embody the collective memory and identity of the people. Before, we had churches, and I believe society still needs singular architecture which represents the culture."